Water/Methanol Injection

I have been doing a little reading on the topic and cant seem to fully understand it. I know that this system is run to cool combustion chambers by mixxing the fluid in with the air mixture, and also increases the octane of the fuel. My question is, are these run with Intercoolers? Or is it obsolete with the FMIC. Anybody here run meth/water? Any pros cons?

You don't need an intercooler to run water/meth. But if you have a turbo you should have an intercooler anyway. I have been looking into this as well. It's not really an expensive mod either

Lol well I know you need an intercooler with the turbo:p But I was just trying to figure out if my JDM FMIC or a meth/water system is more beneficial.

Use both

My buddy has it on his car and swears by it. I want it, but I think I'll eventually save it for my 1g project, (whenever that happens). He has a FMIC with meth injection. Only thing is, if you get your car tuned with it, don't let it run out of water/meth, when boosting high. You might end up running too lean then. But other than that I hear it's supposed to be great, be like having race gas all the time, a cooler intake charge, and cleans the carbon out of the combustion chamber.

The water cools the air temp and the meth/alocohol raises the octain. Very cheap and effective mod. I have heard of people droping intake temps by 30-40 degrees. The only problem is that liquid isin't compressible so your compression ratio will increase slightly.

Some kits come with a controller that will lower boost or retard timing if there is a problem with the system so you dont blow your motor.

Very interesting. This sounds like a decent idea, but I do have my worries about the engine. Also, I wonder how long a tank would last you if was 7 or 8 quarts. And where in the hell would I put it lol.

Some use the windshield washer reservoir and some kits i think come with a bottle you would mount in the hatch area.

Mount it anywhere you would have room. It would last a good while I would think. It would only run at a set psi, so just run a manual boost controller and set it right below where you want it to turn on so it only runs when you are racing or something.

I think I am going to venture into this mod. Sounds like something fun to experiment with.

Alky injection is deffinatly worth it. On my setup if I was to run an injection kit I was told my Sean Glazer(owner of extrememotorsports) that I would see an easy gain of 100awhp. Its not too expensive but, some of the kits require a good amount of time to hook up.

Water Methanol injection has been around since WWII when it was used on fighter planes for power take off and combat. During combat the pilot would have about 20min of increased hp until the fluid carried ran out.

Water Methanol is different then Nitrous. With Nitrous you are adding oxygen to the engine combustion charge leading to more hp. Where as W/M you are adding an oxygenated fuel.

Another way to add more air is though forced induction, turbo or supercharger. Problem is that this forced air will heat up. Add to much air and the ratio of Air to Fuel (A/F) in the combustion chamber will be to lean. A lean mixture is prone to detonation or engine knock and leads to engine damage.

On a turbo or supercharged engine, the A/F is usually set to around 11.5 to 1. At 11.5 the automotive manufacturers are adding in between 10-15% extra gasoline just to cool the cylinder walls and prevent detonation. This extra gasoline is not burned until it goes out the tail pipe and thus you need a catalytic converter.

Now add in W/M. The mixture helps cool the intake air charge from the turbo or supercharger. It will also increase the octane rating of you base fuel by up to 25%. The higher the octane number the better the fuels resistance to detonation. Now you can safely remove that extra 10-15% of fuel and run the engine at an A/F of 12.0.

Why run at 12.0? Because an engine will make maximum hp at 12.0-12.5. 14.5 is best for emissions, and 11.5 is best for detonation control.
W/M injection gives you all the intake cooling and detonation control needed to run your engine at its maximum output potential.

for more information you can go to www.labontemotorsports.com (http://www.labontemotorsports.com)

Best regards,

Dan

Wow, you are a wealth of info on the subject. Thanks a bunch. Helped out quite a bit seeing some numbers.

Welcome to AF. Hopefully you will be an asset, starting off with a boom like that.

100 hp is pushing it. I usually only pick up 50-70 going to 117 octane race fuel, for comparison. But it can be very worthwhile. When done properly, which is a vast topic of its own, I've seen it be very effective. As an example, a direct port injection setup running 75% meth to 25% water with an injection DC directly proportional to IDC (don't recall the value), did just as well as my 2g did on 117 octane. Both our cars were running 30 psi on 2.4 liters at 65 lbs/min, with the same AFR and timing. Only difference was the fuel. Quite impressive.

As Mix mentioned, you need to have a fail safe in place to prevent you from running meth settings on plain pump gas. Many prepackaged kits come with at least a warning light, but I prefer to implement some kind of hard stop, easily done with DSMlink or an EMS. With the AEM for example, you can use the nitrous maps to have it default to standard timing and fuel settings when the meth runs out or a component fails.

HP gains vary from vehicle, yes 100hp gain on a DSM would be high. With W/M you can get the same performance on pump gas as you would with C116 race gas for your tune.

Agreed that a Fail Safe is a good option. Since you lean out the A/F with W/M you don't want to get caught without W/M or your engine will detonate.

Zetronix makes a Fail Safe that monitors A/F ratio. Or a lower cost solution is the IFS-10 by Labonte MotorSports that monitors fluid flow. Most Fail Safes will output a 12V signal in the event of a fault. This can be used to retard timing with an aftermarket ignition box, activate a solenoid to limit turbo to wastegate pressure, or switch maps like in an AEM.

Best regards,

Dan

Wow, you are a wealth of info on the subject. Thanks a bunch. Helped out quite a bit seeing some numbers.

Welcome to AF. Hopefully you will be an asset, starting off with a boom like that.

Thanks for the welcome. Just came across AF a few days ago on a google search. Lots of good info on this forum. Hope I can contribute something valuable to the community.

Best regards,

Dan

I have a question, what if i wanted a way to switch the W/M on and off and say when it was on for track days or what have you DSMlink would recognize it and load a different map that had higher boost and a fuel map for the W/M. would that be possible?

What type of inputs do you have with the DSMLink to switch between maps?

If you were using the VC-25 controller from Labonte MotorSports, it has an injection dissable. You pull a wire to ground with a toggle switch to dissable the injection for when you are stageing the car for a drag race or running a differnt map.

Dan

Kinda what i want to do is when i flip that switch on i want DSMlink to automatically swith to my "race map" for the W/M. In all honesty i dont know the inputs for DSMlink. someone els on here could answer that better than I can

Looking at the User Guide for the DSMLink, it looks like software that allows you to download maps for WOT into the stock engine computer. If that is the case you will need some type of aftermarket engine controller to do the map swapping that you want (AEM)

A simpler solution might be to tune your engine with the DSMLink for the water injection and use a fail safe that activates a solenoid to limit your boost pressure to wastegate pressure.

Best regards,

Dan

another thing, you would only need an fmic if you plan on switching the meth on and off. people can run constant meth 24/7 and not have an intercooler at all, the meth causes the air temps to get progressively cooler with more boost. In this case, the fmic would only slow down airflow. Also with a setup like that, you never have to worry about heatsoak.

Yea but if you had a FMIC also it would cool the air down to a resonable temp them the water/meth would make it even colder. Plus you would have to have a big ass bottle to keep from refilling it everyday.

If your main fuel is gasoline, you still need an intercooler. You aren't injecting enough meth, it's still 95% gasoline. Only running 100% meth only (as your main fuel) can you get away without an IC.

Many prepackaged kits come with at least a warning light, but I prefer to implement some kind of hard stop, easily done with DSMlink or an EMS. With the AEM for example, you can use the nitrous maps to have it default to standard timing and fuel settings when the meth runs out or a component fails.

Kevin, can you explain how I can do this with DSMLink?

Running out of meth during a run is something that I have been worried about, since my only protection comes from a warning LED and the CEL coming on in the presence of knock. But I'm not sure if that would give me enough time to get out of the throttle before something bad happens.

Labonte MotorSports sells an Injection Fail Safe unit (IFS-10)
It is designed to monitor your injection flow and if it drops below a set point it outputs a 12v signal. You could use the 12v to toggle a map in like the AEM or they have a boost bypass solenoid that will limit you to wastegate boost pressure.

Best regards,

Dan

Now that I think about it, I can't see a way to do it with DSMlink... It only works on outputs, no inputs. My bad.